You can’t opt out of ad personalization on Reddit anymore

Reddit has made some changes to its ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings — and one specific update has Redditers up in arms. The company is forcing ad personalization based on your activity on its users, and most users can’t opt out.

The head of privacy at Reddit posted in r/Reddit, where the company typically posts its updates, about a few new changes including updates to preference descriptions for clarity, adding the ability to limit ads from specific categories, and consolidating ad preferences. “The aim is to simplify our privacy descriptions, improve ad performance, and offer new controls for the types of ads you prefer not to see,” the post reads.

But scroll down a bit further and you’ll see this imperative note on Reddit removing the ability for users to opt out of ad personalization: 

“Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity — what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals — to get an idea of what you might be interested in,” the post reads. “The vast majority of redditors will see no change to their ads on Reddit. For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.”

But, as one Reddit user pointed out in the comment section, this could be a violation of the GDPR. The GDPR is a set of regulations in the UK that places restrictions on how companies handle UK users’ data, and one of those restrictions requires companies to let users opt into advertisers using their data. But this new rule is only being implemented in “select countries.”

In the blog post, Reddit added the ability for users to choose to view fewer ads from specific ad categories like alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss in the safety and privacy section or your user settings. But, because the company is using “a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads,” it won’t remove all of the ads from the categories you opt out of — just most of them.